What's new in Quebec for Virtual Agent - features and things to know

[Charlie Steiner]

What's new in Quebec for Virtual Agent

The Quebec release of our Virtual Agent & Natural Language Understanding (NLU) constitutes a major update and includes the rollout of powerful AI and natural language services, out-of-the box conversations, and rich conversational analytics. With Quebec, customers can expect faster time to value, increased self-service opportunities, and measurable insights. All of which delivers more business value and create intelligent end-to-end conversational experiences for end users. 

Check out this Overview video on our latest AI-powered capabilities: Virtual Agent - Benefits (Quebec)

Click on a theme to see the powerful features delivered.

Faster time to value

Increased self-service

Measurable insights

Faster time to value

Guided Setup

Provide implementers with a single guided experience to activate and configure Virtual Agent. Guided setup automatically identifies customer entitlements and presents the available components to enable. The Guided Setup touches on setting up Virtual Agent, Agent Chat, and conversational integrations. 

 

Things to know: Guided setup is available for all ServiceNow packages (Standard, Pro, Enterprise.) Customers can also configure Virtual Agent Lite with Guided Setup. 

Intent Discovery & Topic Recommendations

Run machine learning driven analyses of your incident data (Intent Discovery) to automatically identify critical topics to that can easily be handled by Virtual Agent (Topic Recommendation). Get Virtual Agent up and running by simply adding pre-built conversations with one click to remedy identified areas of improvement.

Things to know: Topic recommendations is available via the ServiceNow store (Store link). It has a dependency on the Intent Discovery app (Store link). It uses a taxonomy created by ITSM that has a list of about 200 intents. Of those 200 intents there are 35-40 with existing conversations. The taxonomy currently does not have HR or Customer Service intents.  

For an intent to map to a conversation, you must have that conversation available in your instance. For example, if you have an intent related to IT issues, the related conversation would only surface if you have downloaded it via the ITSM Virtual Agent conversations (Store link).   

The topic recommendation results will come in priority of matching (by percent). One should start start with the recommended topics before tackling the intent-only recommendations. Intent-only recommendations require you to build topics from scratch.  

Lastly, topic recommendations support multiple languages and show a distribution as to how many records were found in a particular language.  The following languages are supported: English, French, German, Spanish, and Japanese.    

 

Increased self-service

Custom Greetings

Provide a more tailored experience for end users based on where they're initiating the chat from. Based on user context, users can also see promoted topics attached to the greeting for immediate access to important, popular questions and workflows. ​

 

Things to know: In the Paris release, greetings and fallback was configured in the General Settings page. In Quebec, this has been moved and enhanced in a new page: Custom Greetings & Setup. 

AI Search Integration

Receive AI driven search results directly in conversations with Virtual Agent. Utilize an AI Search topic block to generate AI Search results in a conversation or set the AI Search fallback topic block to automatically display search results in conversations instead of the default fallback message. "Genius results" can automatically display the best answer as an actionable card rather than show a list of search results. 

 

AI Search is made possible with NLU incorporated from a recent acquisition. This market-leading technology has the potential to reduce time spent searching by 50%, and because AI Search utilizes machine learning, the search feature will continuously improve its search model and results over time. 

Things to know: AI Search is also available for VA lite users. Genius results need to be manually enabled, and currently only support English. People search genius results require Employee Service Center (ESC). 

Incident Auto-resolution

This key enhancement to Virtual Agent intercepts IT issues that can be resolved automatically in Virtual Agent before they get to a human agent.

 

Incident auto-resolution uses NLU to identify user intentions in the issues they submit either in email or Service Portal. If an issue can be resolved by an existing Virtual Agent topic, incident auto-resolution proactively initiates a Virtual Agent conversation with the end-user to offer assistance. This conversation, through the messaging channel of choice, can be accepted or declined. If declined the end user will be promptly assisted by a human to resolve the issue(s).

Incident Auto Resolution will increase self-solve rates and free up valuable time for agents to focus on high-priority or more complicated issues that cannot be quickly resolved with a Virtual Agent.

Things to know: Incident auto-resolution is currently only supported in English. It only recognizes the following out-of-box ITSM intents in Quebec: Password Reset, VPN Connection, Hardware Issues, and Printer Issues. 

Actionable notifications

Enable and configure Virtual Agent notifications that have actionable buttons that can run a VA topic. Want to quickly close out a request once completed? Just tap the button that pops up in your conversation! You can also add images or a record to the notification. Users can also subscribe/unsubscribe to notifications. 

Things to know: An actionable notification will not interrupt an on-going conversation, including greetings. It will be displayed to the user only after the conversation ends. Actionable notifications are only available for ITSM and HR Pro subscriptions. It is available on third party channels such as Teams, Slack, and Workplace. 

Measurable insights

Conversational Analytics

A brand new and fully customizable analytics tool for analyses of your Virtual Agent. Easily provide deep insights to different personas through a modern and interactive interface. Conversational Analytics is available for download from the ServiceNow Store.

Things to know: Conversational analytics is available via the ServiceNow Store (Store link) for the Quebec release or later. Metrics and custom events begin tracking after activation, analytics are not measured retroactively. Customers can change metric calculations through the "formula override" section, which requires some scripting. For example, a customer can adjust the calculation method of the default “self-solve rate”. Customers can also create their own custom events and metrics to track. There’s a scheduled batch job that updates the dashboard roughly every 15 minutes. 

And more!

We have a whole host of other enhancements, and we highly encourage you to check out the Virtual Agent release notes for more information on each one. 

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